beauty & the beast
by kismet-wayfinder
Summary: Oneshot. Bo, a young woman who's led an uneasy life, decides that she knows what's best for herself on the eve of her sister's wedding, and is willing to keep it that way, even if means making a pact with someone she'd underestimated.


**I own my fan fiction ideas. No fandoms/franchises/et cetera.** **(/disclaimer)  
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><p>Bo stood before the full-length mirror in her bedroom. Ready to take her evening bath, the daughter of a widowed governess was naked, her long, wavy locks of light brown hair cascading down the front of her shoulders, extending all the way to covering up her bosom, as well, as she stared intently at her reflection.<p>

Starting with the observation of her forehead (which she decided was too wide, vertically speaking), she soon decided that her eyes, while aquamarine, were not vibrant enough – they were too dull for her liking - then would come the scrutinizing of her thin lips, which always seemed too pale, especially since she had no rouge to cover them in. Finally, as was usual, she'd look at the rest of the body in the looking glass and deem her waist too thin, her legs and arms too scrawny, and her fingers not long enough. No, she'd never be able to be skilled at the piano this way, not as well as her older sisters were.

Aicia, Orpha and Bell were all much taller, better-curved, stronger-limbed and brighter-eyed than Bo thought her own self to be. Bo, it seemed, had taken after her mother, who was not terribly beautiful, if the truth were to be told; The handsome, though soft-featured face of the sisters' dead father belonged to the three born before her, while she was left to inherit her mother's glum, unimpressive looks.

This, paired with the fact that their father had died while on the warfront of battle on the very night that Bo came into the world, made for an unfair situation in which the only non-blond Rosewater sister grew up being blatantly disliked by all of her sisters, and a fair bit begrudged by her own mother, as well. As soon as she was three years of age, her mother had hired a nanny for her youngest child, before taking up the practice of being a governess.

Going to the houses of wealthy people to teach their children primary school and etiquette lessons, Dorothy Rosewater stayed gone as much as was possible. Her excuse was all the money that came with teaching all the extra lessons, though Bo, being almost fifteen by now, had known far better for quite some time.

"I've heated your bath water, Miss Bolade."

Pulling herself away from the mirror with some reluctance, the girl stepped over to her nanny, who was considerably older now than she had been once upon a time, when Bo was a toddler. All the same, Bo had let Miss Essy call her by her given name since the beginning, and she was still the only one allowed to do so at the present day.

"I don't want to go to Bell's wedding tomorrow," the teenager conceded, slinking down into the metal washtub, feeling her body shiver all over as she adjusted to the warmth of the water within it.

"Why on Earth do you not wanna go?" Miss Essy inquired, gathering up a cup of water as she spoke.

"Her husband-to-be is absolutely horrible, and not to mention _ugly_."

"_Ugly_?" Miss Essy repeated back, before gently pouring the water she'd collected over Bo's head. "He is one of the most good lookingest men I ever seen."

"To you he is, sure - and to Bell, and Orpha, and probably Mother, too. I just see beauty a little bit differently when it comes to men, Miss Essy."

Sighing as she gathered a second cup of water, the nanny said, "Well you be not quite fifteen, Miss Bolade. You don't have to be a'worrying about _men_ just yet. I know Aicia got herself hitched at age fifteen, but it ain't meaning that you gotsta do the same."

"I wasn't planning on getting hitched anytime soon," Bo said to her caretaker, before closing her eyes as the second dousing of water rained down over her head; once it had drenched her hair further, she added, "I ain't planning on getting married _ever_."

Giving a hearty laugh at this, Miss Essy scooped up a third cup of water and said, "You be the silliest girl I ever loved and looked after, Miss Bolade."

"You just wait and see, Miss Essy. I won't ever want to take on a husband."

"Even if that's the case, you see," she replied, pouring the third cup of water over her head. "That attitude won't be stopping men from wanting to take _you_ on as a _wife_."

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><p>As the moon rose to wax at its fullest splendor later on that very evening come nightfall, Bo, dressed in nothing but a long evening gown, snuck out of her plantation home bedroom through her window. Almost at once she wished she'd taken a sweater with her to put on her arms, but it didn't matter now, no matter how cold the winds blew in the autumn, night air. She knew what she needed to do, and she wanted to do it as soon as possible, while she certainly had to chance.<p>

Bo had not gone in search of the old barn near the edge of the woods in quite a long, long time. In fact, she couldn't recall stepping foot in it a single time since the age of eleven, which happened to be a time where she could recall entering into the old barn, though she had absolutely no recollection of how she'd left, or how she'd ended up further out into the woods the next morning, where she'd woken up.

Regardless of how it'd happened, the event had scared her too much for her to return. Indeed, she'd vowed to herself that she'd never go back, seeing as her heart quaked whenever she considered doing it any time after that strange occurrence at age eleven. She'd even left her favorite porcelain doll there, abandoning it due to theoverwhelming sense of dread that came with thinking of the old barn.

Now, as the moonlight above was her only torchlight, the pale-skinned girl – who'd ran across the yard after landing to the ground from her window – was now slowing to a tiptoe of a walk, cautiously and carefully entering on into the old barn. An owl screeched in the distance, and the wind blew through the trees and the chimes she'd strung upon their branches in years past in an ominous fashion. Everything she felt inside her screamed and pleaded with her to turn and run back in the direction from which she'd come.

"_No_, I won't run away," she said aloud – an in-vain attempt at calming herself down.

Knees wobbly, fingers shaking, arms aching, she stepped further on into the building, which smelled of straw and mildew. It was just as she'd remembered it smelling, she thought with a smile. Another step taken, another memory recalled. A second step later and something crunched beneath her foot.

Gasping in pain, she fell backwards onto a small pile of hay, looking upon her foot in the light that made its way through a large hole in the building's roof. Her foot had been cut by something, and was bleeding rather profusely. Tears of pain stung in her eyes as she reached for a rather obvious and big shard of glass. With a few small tugs, she finally got a good grasp and pulled it on out, only to find that it made her foot bleed more. She should've heeded to the signs that had told her to run, she then supposed, before forcing herself to stand, even if she had to hobble her way around, back around toward the barn's entrance.

"Bo – is that you?"

Screaming in both surprise and fright as a male voice spoke her to her, Bo stumbled backwards a bit, trying to gain better balance despite her injury. However, when she stumbled backwards, she happened to bump right into someone, who then proceeded to grab her by way of hooking one arm around her waist from behind. Their other arm rose higher, and Bo soon found that whoever this person was, they wanted her to keep quiet, for they'd clasped a hand to her mouth.

"Shhh…" they said to her, speaking to her in hushed tones. "It's just me - David."

"You're David - as in _Bell_'_s_ David?" Bo mumbled back, and somehow, he understood her, for he answered her, "Yes, I am that David."

"Then let me go and I won't scream no more," the trembling young woman said to him, her heart finally relaxing back into a _slightly_ normal rhythm as he indeed released her from his captive embrace. She then started to turn to face him, but he placed a hand at the side of her hip and a hand at the side of her neck, gently turning her body to face back in the direction it just had been facing.

"Why can't I look at you?" she asked him.

"I'll lose my nerve if you do," he answered, removing his hands from her.

"You'll lose your nerve to do _what_?" she asked, before growing a bit heated in the face as she felt him move up just a bit closer behind her.

"Listen . . . I _know_ you don't want me to marry your sister tomorrow," he said in a quiet voice, lowering his chin down upon Bo's shoulder as he spoke, so that his words flowed directly into her ear, which prickled as it felt his breath upon it. "Truth is, I don't want to marry Bell tomorrow, either, Bo. Once I realized you felt the same about it, I came up with an idea, you see."

"What sort of idea?" Bo replied cautiously, before giving a shaky sigh as she felt David place a hand at either side of her waist, the rest of his body pressed more fully against her.

"Let's run away, you and I. We won't have to be married that way. I'll be happy – you'll be happy. You won't ever have to take on a husband, since you don't want to."

"_David_ . . ." Bo said quietly, reaching for one of his hands, which she held; it felt, she noted at once, much too hairy – indeed, it was so hairy that it was on the verge of feeling like an animal's _fur_ instead of human skin. "I'll . . . run away with you."

"Oh, my beautiful little Bo," the man began to say, but the girl cut him off by clearing her throat, indicated she had something more to say. "Why, yes my love? What is it?"

"If you heard what I said earlier about not wanting to marry, then that means you must've been spying on me while I was . . . in the _bath_ . . ."

The hairs on the back of her neck standing up as David planted a kiss on her shoulder then, Bo gathered all her inner strength and willpower, before saying in as calm a voice as she could, "Please, let me turn around, to kiss you."

Releasing the girl in a somewhat reluctant fashion, David didn't touch her as she turned to look at him. Bo let herself get a fractured-second's glance at the strange, moon lit face of the thing that'd been holding and kissing and speaking with her all this time, before turning and running for her life.

As she rushed herself forward on pure adrenaline alone, momentarily overcoming the pain in her bloodied foot, as well as the paranoid feeling that the thing she'd laid eyes on was following her as she moved, Bo couldn't stop the flashing images of it from disturbing her already troubled mind. From the brief instant she had of laying eyes on it, she could still recall the demoniac, serpentine slant in its yellow eyes. She recalled its strange, slanted nostrils, its slight, but still present and ominous-looking horns. She recalled much about it, but the thing that stuck with her the most was the fur that covered the thing's face. Black fur, it was - covering him all over all over – like a man-wolf of legend or myth.

Just as she thought the fear of it all might grip her heart for good, Bo found herself bursting in through the back kitchen door, entering her home to find a room that was fully lit. Standing amidst the kitchen were two of her sisters, and Miss Essy.

"We were just gonna come a' looking for you, Miss Bolade!" the nanny said in a stern voice, looking a bit angry with her favorite surrogate daughter, before she noticed the wound on her foot, which had trailed blood across the kitchen tiles, at which time her expression and tone of voice softened with pity.

"What happened?" Orpha asked, sounding scared, while Bell moved around the table in the room, in order to pull out a chair for her younger sister to sit in. "Yes, where were you?"

"Oh, there you are!" spoke a male's voice then; looking up in confusion, Bo watched with wide, frightened eyes as she stood near the chair, not actually sitting down upon it.

"David?" she asked aloud.

"Well, of course it's me," he replied, stepping over to her; she took a step away in return. "Well now, what's the matter? I was only just in the parlor, using the telephone to dial your sister Aicia and her husband Barry to come help us in searching for you. You've been gone for a couple of hours now."

_Couple of hours? Impossible,_ Bo thought silently to herself, finally dropping into the chair as Orpha and Bell hurried about, one finding a towel, the other putting on water to boil, all while Miss Essy went searching through the nearby cabinet for an ointment or sav to dress the injured foot with.

"You ought to be more grateful. Your soon-to-be brother in law has been here for the past hour, even though God and ev'ryone knows it's bad luck for the couple to be seeing each other the night before their own wedding!" Bell said, sounding no longer frightened, but more inconvenienced than anything else.

"The past hour – David's been here for the past hour?" Bo repeated back in a weak voice - and when her sister gave her a stern look, one that read "and you should feel guilty about it, too", the young girl hung her head downward, her eyes widening as she thought back to every single interaction she'd had with the thing that had identified itself as David, as well.

Like a flood, her reasoning for seeking out the old church came into her mind at full force, drowning out the sounds of the present company's voices, along with the sounds of the night going on outside, and the sound of even her own labored and panicked breathing.

"_I'll go and make a pact with the Devil at midnight if I have to, just to make sure no man_ ever_ tries to take me on as a wife. If Missy Essy was right, then I don't want it happening to me."_ This had been her reasoning, her logic behind it all. After all, the one thing she'd learned from years of growing up with parental neglect, a dead father, and emotional abuse from her sisters was the fact that God didn't listen and answer prayers.

The way she saw it, maybe He used to did, but not anymore He didn't.

The Devil himself was more likely to help her get what she wanted – she had figured this to be true at least a few years beforehand– but this night, she had intended to act on it, and it had led her to a dark place in her mind and heart, indeed.

Closing her eyes now, a single tear parted from the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek. She had been with neither David, nor a man-wolf – she had been with the Beast himself that night. In utmost horror of her revelation, she tilted her head up slowly, opening her eyes once more, resembling a frightened, caught-in-headlights doe as she did so. Feeling disgusted and terrified inside, she simply stared blankly ahead, without a single outside thing taking her from the seeming haze she'd fallen under.

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><p>"Bo, honey, it's your mother. Wake up now – I'm home to see you."<p>

Standing inside her daughter's bedroom, a short, portly woman with a bun-hairdo and glasses reached out and touched her youngest daughter on the arm, before frowning in a pitying way. "I can't believe you've been like this for the past four years . . ."

When Bo said nothing, but continued staring straight across the room, eyes wide but blankly looking at nothing more than the flower-print wallpaper, the woman stepped out of the room for a moment, before returning with something in her hands.

"We found this earlier on in the morning," she said to Bo, slowly lifting the porcelain doll she was carrying; a piece of glass was missing from its face, and the edges where it had been broken away from were stained partially, with the color of blood. "This used to be yours, now didn't it? Anyway, we're cleaning up because your sister Orpha's getting herself married at long last, and the whole thang is being held outside, near the woods and the old barn. She'd been hoping you could wake up to see it, since you never got to see Bell get married . . . and since Miss Essy isn't with us anymore to see _this_ wedding . . ."

Still, no response came from Bo, regardless of what was said to her. Feeling sad and useless, and perhaps – if she were to be honest with herself – a bit guilty for how badly she'd failed to raise her daughter, the woman placed the doll down to the floor, next to the rocking chair Bo was sat in.

Sighing heavily, she shook her head and left the room to attend to other wedding aspects and duties for that day.

Left alone in her chair to stare at the wall, the full-length mirror that had never been moved could be partially seen by Bo in her peripheral vision. Though she had no words or movements to express it, she felt an uneasiness stir within the pit of her stomach as worms began to crawl up and out from the broken place on her old doll's face. Unable to turn her head from the sight, she kept the same vegetative pose all the while as the worms began to fall onto the ground, more and more proceeding to rise forth after it.

Her heart beating in an uneven way, she felt her arm hairs prickle, for an unnatural wind had blown in through her open window. In the mirror she could barely see, she noticed the shadow first, and then the ever-forming presence of the thing that had greeted her years earlier, out in the old barn.

After a moment or so, and when the thing was clearly and fully present in the mirror's reflection, Bo was rendered terrified as silent tears began to slip down her pale face in an incessant manner. There was nothing she could do at all to escape this time – not even as she felt his breath at the side of her neck.


End file.
